Corporations operating large-scale computing systems invest significant amounts of capital to establish and maintain the hardware necessary to house the computing systems. For example, some computing systems may include a plurality of racks for holding computing devices such as hard drives or entire servers. These racks are typically very expensive to purchase and come in a few standardized sizes.
Because only a few sizes are available, it may hamper the ability of these companies to adopt more efficient architectures. For example, if new, more efficient server devices of different shapes and sizes become available, it may be very difficult to rearrange a standard rack to accommodate the different shapes. In other words, even if devices become 25% smaller, the same rack may not actually be able to hold more devices because the shelves, etc. cannot be rearranged without essentially being rebuilt. Thus, in order to obtain the maximum benefits of new developments in computing devices, the company may be forced to invest in new racks, which can be costly and inefficient.